Wednesday, July 20, 2011

The Phone-Hacking scandal involving News Corp's News of the World tabloid, where various celebrities, politicians, and ordinary people (murder victims, slain British soldiers in Afghanistan) had their voicemail hacked generates a lot of media attention on News Corp's rather unsavory practices there. The BBC, Guardian, and the rest of the far-left British establishment (but I repeat myself) has gone into an orgiastic overload regarding the scandal. However, a new editorial by the Wall Street Journal's Holman Jenkins likens it to a British Watergate, and points out the big area of corruption: the Police.

The scandals involving the corrupt and unethical means by which tabloids gain information about celebrity targets has been old news for decades. Donald E. Westlake wrote about tabloid seamy excesses in the 1988 novel Trust Me On This. One of the ways tabloids would gin up scandal and protect themselves, was to pay associates of celebrity targets substantial sums of money to speculate on tape about weird/repelling and patently untrue things about the celebrity. If sued, the tabloid would produce the tape. The major plot-point of the novel was a murder and attempted murders related to a ruthless attempt to generate pictures of a celebrity target that resulted in deaths. That tabloids were ugly and ruthless in generating dubious content about celebrity and politician targets was old news even then, in 1988. If people don't like that, they only needed to stop buying tabloids, or now stop reading their websites. TMZ, Radar Online, X17, and other gossip sites online (the Huffington Post arguably belongs in that category as well) are not going away. Because people LIKE their content, even if most of it is generated by interns with cheap video cameras trolling celebrity hotspots looking to generate confrontations that are newsworthy. [Celebrity publicists have trained most of their clients to say nothing, just smile and wave as they leave.]

Seamy as it is, this gossip stuff sells, and if the public wants it shut down, they need only stop patronizing it. All of these organizations are private, not government run, and depend utterly on the goodwill and patronage of their readers and viewers.

No, the scandalous thing is the corruption of the British police. Long thought of in the US as a sort of homey, unarmed and incorruptible if clueless police force, the British police have been mired in corruption scandals since at least the 1970s. They have also been inept, and totally PC. Indeed the corruption has gone hand in hand with the PC desires of their masters, the British elite.

As Jenkins writes:

But the bigger scandal, as the headlines are starting to reveal, is the police scandal. Even top cops were phone-"blagged" and yet apparently complained to editors about it rather than treating it as a crime.

Had police pursued obvious wrongdoing and jailed a few journalists back in 1999, a lot fewer British citizens would have been victims of privacy invasions. Those who've likened the hacking scandal to Britain's Watergate are onto something. After the Watergate break-in, behavior that had been tolerated, routine and abetted by official agencies became, overnight, untolerated and prosecuted. Remember, it was the FBI's No. 2, blowing a whistle on his own agency, who played "Deep Throat" to the press.

We're also struck at how often the subject of cocaine comes up. Jonathan Rees, the private eye accused of bribing police to get information on behalf of several tabloids, was Scotland Yard's suspect in the unsolved 1987 ax murder of his partner, who was believed about to blow the whistle on cocaine trafficking by police in southeast London. Rees himself subsequently went to jail, along with a corrupt police officer, for planting cocaine on a woman involved in a child custody dispute. Sean Hoare, the late News of the World reporter who blew the whistle on widespread phone hacking at the tabloids, spoke of widespread cocaine usage on tabloid news desks. For what it's worth, we're guessing that drugs will be part of the story before it's over.

Police, routinely helped tabloids and other papers, including the Daily Mirror (not a News Corp paper), the Daily Telegraph (not a News Corp paper), and likely the Guardian and BBC (also not News Corp outfits to put it mildly) obtain information on people in a corrupt manner. Cocaine and other drugs are rumored to be rampant among the police, tabloid reporters, editors, "respectable" papers, politicians, judges, and the entire British elite. As is a corrupt and venal attitude.

The British version of the TV series "Life on Mars" addressed the corruption and lack of PC-ness, with the view that while the corrupt antagonist to the hero might be well, corrupt, he at least got results and was not handcuffed by PC. The Sopranos Tony Soprano, and the Shield's Vic Mackey are similar characters. Audiences across the West are sick of the PC, more so than the corruption. The PC, multi-culti, diversity stuff just means subordination of ordinary White citizens into an eternal groveling position relative to non-Whites, nearly all of whom have nothing but hostility to the White majority, the traditions, and values of the country. [See Luc Besson's "Taken" for a fairly good run-down of this, as well as his "From Paris With Love."]

However, as noted in the film "Taken," the corruption comes with PC. They are part and parcel. France's police forces have always been viewed as corrupt, enforcers for whoever holds the political reins (Vichy and Occupying Nazis, Napoleons I and III, the Bourbons, corrupt Third Republic, Fourth Republic, and Fifth Republic officials). But the British Police until the 1970's retained a reputation for being both efficient and free of corruption. The problem with the British police has been the corrupt nature of their political leaders. Who have demanded adherence to a PC line, which is explicitly anti-Majority, anti-White, anti-culture, anti-Tradition, anti-History, and totally alien to everything about Britain and its culture and its people. So the only people who were promoted, on the ability to adhere to PC and parrot its idiot delusions, were corrupt individuals who had nothing but contempt for Britain and its people and its values.

You cannot have it half-way, or "best of both worlds." If you want sexy men, for women, then you must deal with the death of the nuclear family, and single-motherhood as the norm for almost every family. And the dysfunction that single-motherhood brings, the fragility, the chaos. If you want multiculturalism and "diversity' then you must deal with sexual discrimination, and isolation of menstruating girls at public High schools:

It’s the scene every Friday at the cafeteria of Valley Park Middle School in Toronto. That’s not a private academy, it’s a public school funded by taxpayers. And yet, oddly enough, what’s going on is a prayer service – oh, relax, it’s not Anglican or anything improper like that; it’s Muslim Friday prayers, and the Toronto District School Board says don’t worry, it’s just for convenience: They put the cafeteria at the local imams’ disposal because otherwise the kids would have to troop off to the local mosque and then they’d be late for Lesbian History class or whatever subject is scheduled for Friday afternoon.

The picture is taken from the back of the cafeteria. In the distance are the boys. They’re male, so they get to sit up front at prayers. Behind them are the girls. They’re female, so they have to sit behind the boys because they’re second-class citizens – not in the whole of Canada, not formally, not yet, but in the cafeteria of a middle school run by the Toronto District School Board they most certainly are.

And the third row? The ones with their backs to us in the foreground of the picture? Well, let the Star’s caption writer explain:

At Valley Park Middle School, Muslim students participate in the Friday prayer service. Menstruating girls, at the very back, do not take part.

Oh. As Kathy Shaidle says:

Yep, that’s part of the caption of the Toronto Star photo.

Yes, the country is Canada and the year is 2011.

Just so. Not some exotic photojournalism essay from an upcountry village in Krappistan. But a typical Friday at a middle school in the largest city in Canada. I forget which brand of tampon used to advertise itself with the pitch "Now with new [whatever] you can go horse-riding, water-ski-ing, ballet dancing, whatever you want to do", but perhaps they can just add the tag: "But not participate in Friday prayers at an Ontario public school."

As Steyn notes, local Canadian Muslims are discussing how best to kill homosexuals. Canadian laws forbid religious worship in public schools. But that law is ignored in Toronto, where local schools are 80-90% Muslim. Of course the "real enemy" is traditional culture, values and people. Icky White Beta males, traditional values, the two-parent nuclear family as John McWhorter writes, "A neighborhood where every child had two parents would be a little odd and almost ominous. Except if it were a highly traditional religious community, one would suspect strangely stringent notions regarding compatibility and even sexuality." [Translation: two-parent families are icky and bad, except for say, non-White immigrants who are religious. Those people are OK, they're not "the wrong sort of White people" who need to be annihilated.]

PC is corrupt. You cannot get "halfway corruption" with PC. You get it all. You get a disregard for everything that traditional society teaches is right, and correct, including treatment of women, those not in the majority, individual rights, the historic culture and tradition, and trust. Police rummage through phone records, record calls, spy on people, and sell the information to which ever tabloid or newspaper or media outlet wants it. News of the World or the BBC. The Sun or the Guardian. It does not matter. The corruption engendered by PC never just stops like the fantasy of "Sharia Lite" where you can get off any time. Like Sharia, like Multiculturalism, like PC, like Diversity, it means a corrupt and brutal environment where nobody but the very rich and powerful have any rights. None.

The Guardian and the BBC will surely come to regret their jihad against News Corp. While News Corp is surely guilty, the role the police play in supplying not just News Corp with phone details, but the BBC and the Guardian, who surely used them, is bound to come out. As is the rampant and shared drug use, trafficking, and corruption of a shared, PC-bound elite. Who have nothing but contempt for ordinary people and their values.

What, really, does PC have to offer? Obeisance to the powers-that-be, that is all. Perhaps a few patronage scraps not gobbled up by the main players, thin gruel indeed. For most people, its an obvious lie that is ground in their faces every day. As long as the money lasts to pay enough people off, like the Soviet Union, then the game will continue. But as the money is running out, the game is coming up. The scandals are not just that News Corp. UK papers hacked phones of a murdered 13 year old and British soldiers slain in Afghanistan. It is that the police were selling to all comers, with coke and money and favors and all sorts of corrupt stuff involved, likely all the way up to the top of Labor, Tory, and Liberal Democrats. Along with most of the elite, and the top people at the BBC and Guardian. News Corp's people on the spot, James Murdoch, Rebecca Brooks, and others, all know where the bodies are buried. The shared coke, the favor trading, the police flogging secrets of ordinary people thrust into the news and celebrities alike, all for a price. And who got what to get what, including rival organizations. Like the Boss Tweed Ring, this is not an isolated pattern but a national scandal.

Because PC makes you corrupt. And the price of the corruption is sure to come out. Those in the dock of the media frenzy will drag others right along with them. With the result that the British public will realize their police and elites are a bunch of coked-out corrupt cronies, all connected, and all venal and small.

8 comments:

Whiskey, have you ever watched the cult classic BBC series "1990"? It starred the late Edward Woodward. Woodward was most famous in America as the lead on the hit crime drama "The Equalizer."

"1990" was set in a dystopian future ("Nineteen Eighty-Four plus six" its creator dubbed it)in which Britain is under the grip of the Home Office's Public Control Department (PCD), a tyrannically oppressive bureaucracy riding roughshod over the population's civil liberties.

Edward Woodward plays Jim Kyle, a journalist writing for one the last quasi-independent newspaper called The Star, who turns renegade and begins to fight the PCD covertly. The officials of the PCD, in turn, constantly try to provide proof of Kyle's subversive activities.

Exposition in this series was mainly performed by facts occasionally dropped into dialogue, requiring the viewer to piece together the basic scenario.

This state of affairs was precipitated by a critical financial collapse (possibly an irrecoverable national bankruptcy) in the early 1980s, triggering a de facto state of emergency, the government cancelling the General Election and causing the economy (and imports) to drastically contract forcing stringent rationing of housing, goods and services. These are distributed according to a person's status in society as determined (and constantly reviewed) by the PCD on behalf of the government, which is union-dominated and socialistic in nature. As a consequence, the higher-status individuals appear to be civil servants and union leaders. An exception to this is import/export agents, which appear to be immune to state control due to their importance to the remnants of the economy. The House of Lords has been abolished and turned into an exclusive dining club. State ownership of businesses appears to be near-total and taxation of wealth and income appears to be very high. The ruling monarch is male, but his identity is never made clear. The currency is the Anglodollar which appears to have little value overseas due to the poor quality of British exports. The armed forces have been run down to the extent that they are little more than an internal security force. This is made clear in one episode where the RAF is described as consisting of little more than a few dozen counter-insurgency helicopters.

Although running the bureaucratic dictatorship, the state appears to shy away from explicit political violence, preferring to set up psychiatric pseudo-hospitals called 'Adult Rehabilitation Centres' which employ electro-convulsive treatments to 'cure' dissidents. Ordinary criminals found guilty of traditional and new economic and social crimes are prevented from clogging up the prison system by having short sentences during which they are force-fed 'misery pills', which induce severe depression during their incarceration. Despite this, fatalities and injuries do occur due to the PCD's lack of democratic accountability but these are misreported or ignored by the state-controlled press and television or are suppressed by the print unions on the last independent newspaper in the UK. The state can also declare a person to be a 'non-citizen' which denies them any entitlement whatsoever to consumer goods, accommodation or food. Labour is controlled by a mandatory closed shop in every workplace. For at least part of the series, the country is on a three-day working week, presumably to conserve energy or to promote full employment through job sharing. Taking a second job is illegal as is 'parasitism', defined as claiming state benefits while fit for work.

Emigration is a key problem with a steady 'Brain Drain' countered by PCD Emigration officers who try to watch every port and airfield. Despite this, professional and skilled labour is fast disappearing from the country in a similar manner to East Germany before the Berlin Wall. This is a neat reversal of the immigration controversies of the mid-to late 1970s in the UK.

1990 was a British then-futuristic political drama television series produced by the BBC in the late 1970s.

The series is set in a dystopian future in which Britain is under the grip of the Home Office's Department of Public Control (PCD), a tyrannically oppressive bureaucracy riding roughshod over the population's civil liberties.

Edward Woodward plays Jim Kyle, a journalist on the last independent newspaper called The Star, who turns renegade and begins to fight the PCD covertly. The officials of the PCD, in turn, try to provide proof of Kyle's subversive activities.

Exposition in this series was mainly performed by facts occasionally dropped into dialogue requiring the viewer to piece together the basic scenario.

This state of affairs was precipitated by a critical financial collapse (possibly an irrecoverable national bankruptcy) in the early 1980s, triggering a de facto state of emergency, cancelling the General Election and causing the economy (and imports) to drastically contract forcing stringent rationing of housing, goods and services. These are distributed according to a person's status in society as determined (and constantly reviewed) by the PCD on behalf of the government, which is union-dominated and socialistic in nature. As a consequence, the higher-status individuals appear to be civil servants and union leaders. An exception to this is import/export agents, which appear to be immune to state control due to their importance to the remnants of the economy. The House of Lords has been abolished and turned into an exclusive dining club. State ownership of businesses appears to be near-total and taxation of wealth and income appears to be very high. The ruling monarch is male, but his identity is never made clear. The currency is the Anglodollar which appears to have little value overseas due to the poor quality of British exports. The armed forces have been run down to the extent that they are little more than an internal security force. This is made clear in one episode where the RAF is described as consisting of little more than a few dozen counter-insurgency helicopters.

Although running the bureaucratic dictatorship, the state appears to shy away from explicit political violence, preferring to set up psychiatric pseudo-hospitals called 'Adult Rehabilitation Centres' which employ electro-convulsive treatments to 'cure' dissidents. Ordinary criminals found guilty of traditional and new economic and social crimes are prevented from clogging up the prison system by having short sentences during which they are force-fed 'misery pills', which induce severe depression during their incarceration. Despite this, fatalities and injuries do occur due to the PCD's lack of democratic accountability but these are misreported or ignored by the state-controlled press and television or are suppressed by the print unions on the last independent newspaper in the UK. The state can also declare a person to be a 'non-citizen' which denies them any entitlement whatsoever to consumer goods, accommodation or food. Labour is controlled by a mandatory closed shop in every workplace. For at least part of the series, the country is on a three-day working week, presumably to conserve energy or to promote full employment through job sharing. Taking a second job is illegal as is 'parasitism', defined as claiming state benefits while fit for work.

Emigration is a key problem with a steady 'Brain Drain' countered by PCD Emigration officers who try to watch every port and airfield. Despite this, professional and skilled labour is fast disappearing from the country in a similar manner to East Germany before the Berlin Wall. This is a neat reversal of the immigration controversies of the mid-to late 1970s in the UK.

Really, Whiskey, although a few shots will be taken at the conservative Murdoch and his daughter, I think things will be covered up by the MSM because it's the elite and their high level appointees who have done wrong here. This "scandal" will never be investigated fully, with people being sent off to prison, as they should be.

Of course the "real enemy" is traditional culture, values and people. Icky White Beta males, traditional values, the two-parent nuclear family as John McWhorter writes, "A neighborhood where every child had two parents would be a little odd and almost ominous. Except if it were a highly traditional religious community, one would suspect strangely stringent notions regarding compatibility and even sexuality." [Translation: two-parent families are icky and bad, except for say, non-White immigrants who are religious. Those people are OK, they're not "the wrong sort of White people" who need to be annihilated.]

John McWhorter makes me laugh. Like any leftist he's so far-left he makes up stories and believes that Bachmann a Tea Party neoconservative libertarian chick is "far-right". How idiotic. On the other hand it's entertaining to see the tactics that leftists use on libertarians and neoconservative as they go ballistic. It makes us more prepared for their attacks on a weird kind of way.

I downloaded all sixteen fifty-minute episodes from this website a couple of months ago. They were all available on Megaupload. Just click on the caption that says "Alternate Method - Direct Link" to download. Hopefully, the episode links are still active.

http://ipb.quicksilverscreen.im/index.php?/topic/281335-1990-1977/

Or, if you don't wish to download the series, it's available as a DVD set on iOffer for $35.00.

A couple of Mulholland's critiques of the series are valid, others I think are misplaced. For example, he criticizes "1990" for being studio bound and having a low budget. It's arguable that the low budget of "1990" perversely works in its favor. As you watch the series, it definitely has a brooding, seedy atmosphere of menace that conveys how living in a threadbare, authoritarian Britain choking on on an oppressive bureaucracy and pervasive corruption might look. Here, read the whole thing...

I downloaded all sixteen fifty-minute episodes from this website a couple of months ago. They were all available on Megaupload. Just click on the caption that says "Alternate Method - Direct Link" to download. Hopefully, the episode links are still active.

http://ipb.quicksilverscreen.im/index.php?/topic/281335-1990-1977/

Or, if you don't wish to download the series, it's available as a DVD set on iOffer for $35.00.

A couple of Mulholland's critiques of the series are valid, others I think are misplaced. For example, he criticizes "1990" for being studio bound and having a low budget. It's arguable that the low budget of "1990" perversely works in its favor. As you watch the series, it definitely has a brooding, seedy atmosphere of menace that conveys how living in a threadbare, authoritarian Britain choking on an oppressive bureaucracy and pervasive corruption might look. Here, read the whole thing...